Take Off, the digital nomad app
Creating an Authentic Experience
The digital nomad life is one that has always caught my eyes (sandy beaches, trying new food, immerse into another culture, sounds amazing, right?).
I took it upon myself to further research and investigate what goes behind the Instagram posts. I am very fortunate to have lovely people that have experienced that lifestyle in my network, as part of the design process I conducted user interviews with them.
I discovered that digital nomads face 3 main challenges when settling into a new location:
Cultural Integration: Living in a new country many digital nomads miss out on the cultural experiences that they crave without the support of a local person that helps them integrate into it.
Work and Time Zone Management: Many nomads are unable to fully enjoy their experience due to the difficulty in managing time zone differences for work and leisure.
Emergency Response: Access to Medical care in their language is something many nomads are concerned about.
The app concept that I have been working on is meant to maximize authentic cultural experiences by:
Bringing locals and nomads together through a rewards program. Local Guides would earn money every time they cater an experience to their nomad and nomads would earn badges acknowledging the level of cultural integration.
It will serve as an assistant and a planner keeping the Nomad’s calendar optimized allowing them to focus on experiencing a new place rather than trying to manage a work schedule.
Saving their insurance card information and connecting it with local hospitals. In case of emergency, they would know who to call and where to go.
Another way to think about it is as if Google Calendar, Airbnb and Toggl merged their powers into one app.
Design Process 📲
I interviewed 6 digital nomads in their mid-20s to mid-30s to gather insights about their lifestyle, their personalities, and their likes or dislikes.
The information acquired helped me create a couple of user personas that represent the app’s ideal user.
I conducted a series of card sorting exercises to prepare Take Off’s information architecture.
I sketched User Flows and I tested them with the POP app by Marvel where I realized I was missing the POV of the Local Guide. After adding one more user persona to help me represent the Local Guides I created more sketches to quickly test it again and then moved on to wireframing and prototyping in Figma.
Information Architecture 📲
Low Fidelity Wireframe - Sign Up 📲
Low Fidelity Wireframe - Choose a Local Guide 📲
Prototype 📲
Once I had the prototype ready I continued user testing with individuals that had no concept or a very vague idea of Take Off’s purpose. My goal was to know how intuitive the task navigation was.
I asked my 3 new Users to walk me through the onboarding process, where would they go if they wanted to check out what kind of solo adventures were available and to choosing a Local Guide.
Their feedback guided me towards adding a few buttons to help my User feel oriented when performing a task. For example, part of the onboarding consists of syncing the digital nomad’s existent digital calendar with the app for it to create reminders for the upcoming meetings and deadlines specifying the time zone difference between cities. However, the first prototype only displayed the clients’ profile pictures the day the meeting was booked, whereas now pressing the images will show more detailed information to know the whos and whys.
The second addition was a direct button on the home and planner screens to access the calendar since on the first prototype it required more actions to get to it.
Here is a little sample of how Take Off looks and how it works:
After reading the case study, I would love to know your feedback if you have the time. Is this something you would potentially use? Do you like the result so far? What do you think can be improved?
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Thank you all for reading!